What to feed crows so they'll fall in love with you
and other crow facts
I’ve been trying to get a crow to fall in love with me because I want crow gifts. I just think we’ll be into the same things - I like shiny stuff and trinkets too. So far there’s been curiosity, a bit of staring, maybe a little affection, but not love… yet.
Sharing my research:
How to bribe a crow
Give them healthy snacks
nuts (I feed them walnuts)
hard boiled eggs (this feels wrong)
meat
berries and fruits
insects
cat food
Avoid sugar (even though they love it), salt, seasoned foods, and white bread - they’ll still be ok if they eat it, but it’s not good for them.
Crow vs. Raven
The raven is a much bigger cousin of the crow. They’re in the same genus (Corvus) so they’re closely related and share a lot of characteristics.
“The voice is the easiest characteristic. If you can hear them, the crow is mainly going to caw, and the raven is going to quark and drip like a faucet and bark like a dog, and make lots of other sorts of noises.”
Ravens are the largest songbird in the world
“All birds have a syrinx. It has a junction box there between the two branches of the bronchi that go to the lungs, and it’s where the voice is produced. But the thing that the songbirds have that the others don’t are very complex muscles that wrap around that syrinx so that it can warp and pull and stretch in so many ways to make such a variable amount of noise.”
Good interview with John Marzluff
Crow symbolism and mythology
The spiritual meaning of crows
“Native Americans view them as messengers between the living and the dead, Sometimes, they were depicted as tricksters.” - Daniel P. Compora, Ph.D.
"In Norse mythology, the God Odin has two crows that he sets free daily," says Compora. The crows serve as Odin's messengers.
“In Roman mythology, Apollo was noted to have a white crow who watched over his pregnant lover Delphos. But when the crow brought bad news to Apollo, he turned black.” - Maggie Wilson
More: crow mythology, crow art, and why crows are black.
The Crow, 1994
Not an actual crow, an ok movie that I love - The Crow is a goth classic, very atmospheric, based on the comic book, and super 90s. Really good soundtrack and score. Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee’s hot son) was killed on set - there’s a lot of conspiracy about it and Bruce Lee’s death - decent rabbit hole to go down, very sad but also adds to the gothiness. Skip the sequels and remakes, they’re all horrible.
Nest art - very metal
European crows and magpies are building nests out of anti-bird spikes
“Nests recovered from trees in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium were found to be constructed almost entirely from strips of long metal spikes that are often attached to buildings to deter birds from setting up home on the structures.
The discovery prompted researchers at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden to scour the internet for further examples, leading to the identification of another anti-bird spike nest in Glasgow. One of the reviewers of the study then flagged a fourth nest in Enschede in the Netherlands.”
